Heretics and Heroes Thomas Cahill

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THE HINGES OF HISTORY

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

In this series, THE HINGES OF HISTORY, I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West. This is also the story of the evolution of Western sensibility, a narration of how we became the people that we are and why we think and feel the way we do. And it is, nally, a recounting of those essential moments when everything was at stake, when the mighty stream that became Western history was in ultimate danger and might have divided into a hundred useless tributaries or frozen in death or evaporated altogether. But the great gift-givers, arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for trans guration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

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THE HINGES OF HISTORY

VOLUME I

HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION

THE UNTOLD STORY OF IRELAND’S HEROIC ROLE FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE RISE OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

This introductory volume presents the reader with a new way of looking at history. Its time period—the end of the classical period and the beginning of the medieval period—enables us to look back to our ancient roots and forward to the making of the modern world.

VOLUME II earliest blossoming of Western sensibility, there being no West before the Jews.

VOLUME III

DESIRE OF THE EVERLASTING HILLS THE WORLD BEFORE AND AFTER JESUS

This volume, which takes as its subject Jesus and the rst Christians, comes directly after The Gifts of the Jews, because Christianity grows directly out of the unique culture of ancient Judaism.

VOLUME IV

SAILING THE WINE-DARK SEA WHY THE GREEKS MATTER

The Greek contribution to our Western heritage comes to us largely through the cultural conduit of the Romans (who, though they do not have a volume of their own, are a presence in Volumes I, III, and IV). The Greek contribution, older than Christianity, nevertheless continues past the time of Jesus and his early followers and brings us to the medieval period. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea concludes our study of the making of the ancient world.

VOLUME V

MYSTERIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES

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THE CULTS OF CATHOLIC EUROPE

The high Middle Ages are the rst iteration of the combined sources of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultures that make Western civilization so singular. In the fruitful interaction of these sources, science and realistic art are rediscovered and feminism makes its first appearance in human history.

VOLUME VI

HERETICS AND HEROES

HOW RENAISSANCE ARTISTS AND REFORMATION PRIESTS CREATED OUR WORLD

The European rediscovery of classical literature and culture precipitates two very di erent movements that characterize the sixteenth century. The rediscovery of Greco-Roman literature and art sparks the Renaissance, rst in Italy, then throughout Europe. New knowledge of Greek enables scholars to read the New Testament in its original language, generating new interpretations and theological challenges that issue in the Reformation. Though the Renaissance and the Reformation are very di erent from each other, both exalt the individual ego in wholly new ways.

VOLUME VII

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All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

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Endpaper: Pieter Bruegel, Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

Jacket illustration: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1555 (oil on canvas), Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c. 1525–1569) / Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels / The Bridgeman Art Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cahill, Thomas.

Heretics and heroes : how Renaissance artists and Reformation priests created our world / by Thomas Cahill.— First edition.

pages cm.—(The hinges of history; volume VI) Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Renaissance. 2. Reformation. 3. Ego (Psychology)—History. 4. Europe—Civilization. I. Title. CB359.C34 2013

940—dc23 2013006241 eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-53416-1 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-49557-8

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I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.

—Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521 I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion. But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is.… He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right.

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PRELUDE

PHILOSOPHICAL TENNIS THROUGH THE AGES

In nature’s infinite book of secrecy A little I can read.

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H

is nickname is Plato, which means “broad.” He’s an immensely con dent if unsmiling Athenian, wide of forehead, broad of shoulders, bold of bearing, who casually exudes a breadth of comprehension few would dare to question. As he lobs his serve across the net, he does so with a glowering power that the spectators nd thrilling. Throughout his game, his stance can only be labeled lofty; he seems to be reaching ever higher, stretching toward Heaven while his raised shirt provides an occasional glimpse of his noble abs.

His serve is answered by his graceless opponent, a rangy, stringy-muscled man who plays his game much closer to the ground, whose eyes dart everywhere, who looks, despite his relative youth, to stand no chance of mounting a consistent challenge to our broad and supremely focused champion. And yet the challenger—his name is Aristotle, son of a provincial doctor—manages to persist, to meet his opponent with an ungainly mixture of styles. From time to time it even appears that he could be capable of victory. Certainly he is dogged in his perseverance. He begins to gain some fans in the crowd among those who prefer the improvisations of Aristotle to the unblinking gloom of great Plato.

This is a game that has been played over and over—in fact, for twenty-four centuries —before audiences of almost in nite variety. At some point long ago, the game became a doubles match, for the two Greek philosophers were joined by two medieval Christian theologians: Plato by Augustine of Hippo, who could nearly equal him in style and seriousness; Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas, nearly as styleless as Aristotle but, though overweight, ungainly, and blinking in the sun, extremely thoughtful and genial—the sort of athlete who is always undervalued. This centuries-long philosophical doubles match has entertained intellectuals in every age and made a partisan of almost every educated human being in the Western world.

To this day, it may be asked of anyone who cares about ideas: Are you a Platonist or a n Aristotelian? Plato certainly won the opening set, waged in Athens in the fourth century BC; and once he had Augustine at his side, he, if anything, grew in stature during the early medieval centuries. But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, medieval academics, such as Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas—who were not only deep thinkers but gifted publicists—were able to create a culture-wide renaissance on Aristotle’s behalf. Then, in the period we shall visit in this book, in the time of the

Renaissance and Reformation, the pendulum would swing once more, as the graceful team of Plato and Augustine became the subject of nearly universal admiration, while the ungainly team of Aristotle and Aquinas suffered scorn and devaluation.1

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styles should be accounted athletic only in metaphor, for in actuality, these styles—or lack thereof—are the qualities of their literary output. Plato is a great Greek prose stylist, never surpassed; nor did anyone ever write more well-knit, muscular Latin than Augustine. Aristotle’s Greek is banal, even at times confusing; Aquinas’s Latin prose, though clear, is scarcely more than serviceable. But these men and their philosophical heirs have surely been engaged in utterly serious, if sporting, contests about the ultimate nature of reality; and these contests have had profound, and sometimes deadly, consequences for us all.

Before Plato’s arrival on the scene, the typical philosopher was a cross between a poet and a guru, dependable for pithy and memorable sayings—“Know thyself”; “Nothing endures but change”; “The way up and the way down are the same”—but quite incapable of elaborating his insight in a layered structure that could withstand criticism. Plato, father to all subsequent philosophical discourse, transformed the pursuit into a kind of science, full of sequential steps, a long course of acquired knowledge that begins in observation and ends in wisdom, even in vision.

The uctuating phenomena of physical life, according to Plato, are only minimally real. We can never hope to understand them from the inside, for they are relative, evanescent, and mortal, here today, gone tomorrow. If we are embarked upon the ascent to wisdom, however, these sensible things can lead us upward—from the merely material world to the absolute spiritual world on which all eeting phenomena depend. What is more fragile than the momentary existence of a ower? But we can come to understand the truth that a ower “can be beautiful only insofar as it partakes of absolute beauty.”

The phenomena of our world, in Plato’s teaching, are there to lead us to the absolute realities of which they are but partial, momentary expressions. These realities, which Plato called the Forms, are Beauty, Truth, Justice, Unity (or Oneness), and, highest of all, Goodness, since the other Forms are themselves but partial expressions of the ultimate reality, the Good.

Human beings are bizarre combinations of the physical and the spiritual. Each of us is like a charioteer who must control two steeds: one material, instinctive, unruly, and seeking only its own low pleasures; the other spiritual, brimming with nobility, honor, and courage. The charioteer’s identity survives death, for it is spiritual, the rational principle, the soul. But the steed that is his body must perish.

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belief, Augustine nds that “out of a certain compassion for the masses God Most High bent down and subjected the authority of the divine intellect even to the human body itself”—in the incarnation of Jesus, the God-Man—so that God might recall “to the intelligible world souls blinded by the darkness of error and befouled by the slime of the body.”

Note that “slime.” For both Plato and Augustine, human life is a gloomy business, beset by the dross of meaningless matter, mitigated only by the hard-won illumination of that one-in-a-million character, the true philosopher (for Plato), or by the illumination that God bestows on a few blessed individuals (for Augustine). On our own, in Plato’s view, we are capable only of misunderstanding everything important. On our own, in Augustine’s view, we are capable only of sin. But to some few, God has gratuitously granted grace that enables them to see the light and choose the good. They are the ones who will live with God eternally; all the others (most of humanity, including all the unbaptized, even unbaptized babies, and probably you, dear Reader) will spend eternity in Hell.

This is tough stu ; and no wonder it prompted some thoughtful medieval Christians to look for a path that might soften the grim austerities of the Platonic-Augustinian worldview. In the dissenting works of Aristotle, Plato’s most famous pupil, they discovered a foundation on which they could build an airier, more open structure.

For Aristotle, there is no world of Forms beyond the world we know and see. The Forms are indeed universal ideas; they do not, however, exist apart somewhere but only in things themselves and in our minds. There is no absolute Beauty in some other world; there is only beauty in, say, the woman that I happen to see before me at this moment and in the idea of beauty that I and other human beings have in our minds. Thomas Aquinas championed this same approach, which came to be called moderate realism, as opposed to the position of Plato and Augustine, which came to be called extreme realism —the assertion that what is really real is not anything we perceive with our senses but the essences that exist elsewhere.

Not eschewing physical realities, as did Plato, Aristotle was far more open to considering seriously the inner workings of material phenomena. His observations of the natural world, therefore, form the basis of much of what we would deem the science of ancient and medieval thinkers. Indeed, what we call science today was for Aristotle and his followers a perfectly legitimate branch of knowledge that they called natural philosophy. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, the unaided human mind is capable of perceiving reality as it is—an assertion that the pessimistic duo of Plato and Augustine have nothing but contempt for.

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Aristotelian-Thomistic schools, the gulf between the two great philosophical syntheses continues to widen, as each embraces opposed positions in many areas of thought. Without elaborating on these oppositions here, we may remind ourselves that the two schools are nonetheless both designated as species of realism and that other positions are possible. Against realism of any variety stands the philosophical school of idealism, which asserts that what Plato calls the Forms are to be found only in the human mind. All we have are the workings of our minds—our ideas—and, according to idealists, it is illegitimate (if tempting) for philosophers (or anyone) to speak of anything outside the mind itself. Idealists of more than one variety are also called nominalists, those who assert that the concepts (or nomina, names) we attribute to the physical universe—lion, chair, star—are convenient labels without ultimate meaning. The most frequently encountered nominalism of our own day is called logical positivism.

I mean here merely to nod in the direction of such controversies, which could easily ll a book I have no wish to write. Though the centuries-long game of philosophical tennis may excite you at rst, absorb and draw you into its ups and downs (and its sometimes surprising upsets), its mesmerizing back-and-forths can lull you into a kind of trance and nally threaten to become a serious bore. Let’s just keep at the back of our minds the poc-poc of the philosophical tennis ball as it hits the meshed rackets of our sweating champions and turn our attention, rather, to a few of the unsettling events that in the course of the late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fteenth centuries signal that we are on the road to the Renaissance and the Reformation.

1_{With the rise of scientific materialism, the pendulum swung back in the Aristotelian direction and has pretty much}

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INTRODUCTION

DRESS REHEARSALS FOR PERMANENT CHANGE

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in

erecting a grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill!

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1282: THE SICILIAN VESPERS

“Moranu li Franchiski!” screamed the Sicilians in their peculiar dialect. “Death to the Frenchmen!”

A large, festive crowd had gathered outside the Church of the Holy Spirit, a half mile southeast of the Sicilian capital of Palermo. It was early evening of Easter Monday 1282, and the prayer service of vespers was soon to commence inside the church. An unwelcome contingent of uniformed French o cials, representatives of the hated occupation forces, showed up, possibly a little tipsy on spring wine, and attempted to consort with some of the pretty, young Sicilian women in the crowd. Sicilians were a historic mixture of prehistoric peoples—called Sicani and Siculi—ancient Greeks, Orthodox Byzantines, Italian mainlanders, North African Arabs and other “Saracens,” and the Northmen (or Normans) who were originally Norwegian Vikings. But the one thing they all knew they were not was Franchiski. The Frenchmen claimed to be checking for weapons, while surreptitiously fondling female breasts. One sergeant made the mistake of petting a young bride whose outraged husband carried a knife, which was swiftly put to use. The other Frenchmen, attempting to close ranks against the crowd, found rocks raining down on them, then blades slashing into them, as the Sicilians rose in a body.

“Moranu li Franchiski!” rang out as the bells of the church proclaimed that vespers was about to begin. Their message was taken up by bells throughout Palermo, as was the cry “Moranu li Franchiski!” All Sicily rose in revolt. “By the time the furious anger at their insolence had drunk its ll of blood,” in the words of one early chronicler, “the French had given up to the Sicilians not only their ill-gotten riches but their lives.” Many thousands lay dead throughout the island, two thousand French corpses in Palermo alone.

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The popes, who had invented the notion of a Holy Roman Emperor of the West, had come to regret investing so much power in the hands of one man. They now preferred the French royals as counterweights to the Holy Roman Hohenstaufens; thus their support of Charles. What Martin IV, pope at the time and himself a Frenchman, did not know was that Spanish Peter had built his eet with funds sent by Michael Paleologos, Roman Emperor of the East, from his capital of Constantinople. For, as Paleologos knew, there was also another eet, sitting in the Sicilian harbor of Messina, built by Charles for the purpose of invading Constantinople. This eet the Sicilians set a re in their island-wide rampage, dashing Charles’s bellicose intentions.

The pope, who had excellent sources of information, also knew of the existence of the eet at Messina but had been assured by Charles that it was in aid of his crusade against Islam. Oh, all right then, said the pope, so long as you don’t intend to use it against the Eastern emperor, whom I hope to lure into an ecumenical agreement, thus reuniting our divided churches. Whether reuni cation was to be achieved through talk (à la Pope Martin) or through conquest (à la Charles), the formal schism between East and West, little more than two centuries old, still looked healable to many, if not most, European Christians. After the Sicilian Vespers, however, there would be but one more attempt to reunite Christendom—at the Council of Florence in 1439—and by then failure was the expectable outcome.

Though the bishops of East and West found themselves in substantial agreement at Florence, the monks and the ordinary Christians of the East rmly rejected reunion. Far more conscious of nationality than they had once been (if not so well versed in theological abstractions), they felt they would be giving up too much autonomy should the proposed reunion go forward. This meant that Christianity was to exist in the world in two permanent forms, Orthodox and Catholic, and that these would remain signi cantly di erent in fairly obvious ways. Such divergence could only encourage speculation that there might be even more diversity in the future—almost as much diversity, perhaps, as was to be found among the various nation-states then forming inchoately.

A s A. N. Wilson has remarked, “The long dominance of the island [of Sicily] by Charles of Anjou was over. Charles, the most powerful gure in the Mediterranean, had been on the point of invading Constantinople. Egged on by a succession of French, or Francophile, popes, he had hoped not merely to regain Byzantium for the West, but also to subjugate the Eastern Orthodox Church to the authority of the papacy. With the Sicilian Vespers, there died any possibility of a universal papacy dominating Christendom. The foundations had been laid for the phenomena that shaped modern Europe—the development of nation states and, ultimately, of Protestantism.”

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French punctiliousness on Sicilian uidity— has long claimed a hold on the European imagination. It was referred to in the fourteenth century by Boccaccio, whom we shall have the pleasure of consulting next. In the nineteenth century it helped fuel Italian nationalism to such an extent that Verdi wrote an opera about it. Perhaps most famously, it crept slyly into a sixteenth-century conversation in which the blu King Henry IV of France—who, as he said, “ruled with weapon in hand and arse in the saddle”—boasted to the Spanish ambassador of his fearsome martial capabilities. “I will breakfast in Milan, and I will dine in Rome,” roared the king ahead of a planned campaign.

“Then,” said the ambassador, smiling pleasantly, “Your Majesty will doubtless be in Sicily in time for vespers.”

1353: HOW TO SURVIVE THE BLACK DEATH

“It’s only human to have compassion for the a icted—a good thing for everyone to have, especially anyone who once needed comfort and found it in someone else; and speaking of such need, if anyone ever needed compassion or appreciated it or delighted in it, I’m the guy.”

So begins Giovanni Boccaccio in the prologue to his revolutionary collection of streetwise stories, the Decameron, written midway through the fourteenth century. A lifelong admirer of the elevated diction of Dante’s truly divine Comedy, Boccaccio nonetheless makes scant attempt to imitate the sublime poetry of his literary hero. Though Dante composed his masterpiece in medieval Tuscan (which would become the chief font of modern Italian), the model for his written style was Virgil, most exalted of all Latin poets, so that Dante’s tightly controlled Italian often owes more to the ancient Romans than to any of his Florentine contemporaries. The Tuscan prose of Boccaccio’s characters—starting right here at the outset, in the voice of Boccaccio’s own persona— can be so atly realistic, so accidental, so resolutely conversational that it may appear at times almost to echo occasional monologues in The Sopranos. For readers who have previously immersed themselves in Dante’s precision, a dip into what one critic calls Boccaccio’s “decidedly non-canonical vocabulary” can be a shock. The meanderings of Boccaccio’s characters, the ladies and gentlemen of the late Middle Ages, sometimes stray closer to the denizens of low-life New Jersey than to anything Virgilian.

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Boccaccio’s pages, entertaining centuries of readers in a series of witty, quickly moving

novelle (brief tales or short stories).

If Dante’s hallowed Comedy, his imaginative visit to the world beyond the grave, must be ranked as the greatest of all Italian literary feats, Boccaccio’s Decameron (or Ten Days, in which a hundred rollicking stories are told by seven beautiful young women and three handsome young men for their mutual entertainment) surely rates as a close second. But the latter work, only about thirty years younger than the earlier one, is so di erent in tone as to give any reader pause. Why does Boccaccio, fellow Florentine, unparalleled admirer and interpreter of Dante, sound so di erent from his acknowledged master?

One could point to the di erence in subject matter (Dante treats of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, while Boccaccio con nes himself to this life) and to the di erence in diction and e ect between poetry and prose, but neither of these considerations takes us far enough. The deep di erence between the two maestros lies in their attitudes toward life itself, Dante always grave and serious, Boccaccio cynical and … disappointed. Boccaccio is so imaginative, so creative that he can use his cynicism—his worldly-wise pose of “Well, what did you expect?”—to mask his disappointment. Dante, despised and persecuted by a corrupt pope, then su ering lifelong political banishment from his beloved Florence, knew all too well the injustices wrought by both church and state; Boccaccio expects less of Florentines, as well as of all human beings, than does Dante. Whereas Dante’s tripartite vision gives us as discriminating a map as we shall ever have of the moral universe and of the earthly choices we must make if we are to reach God, Boccaccio repeatedly advises us to snatch whatever pleasure we can as it presents itself, for we may not be given a second chance.

Is there a funnier scene in all of anticlerical literature than the one in which the grand abbess Madonna Usimbalda of Lombardy, learning from her tattletale nuns that the novice Isabetta has a man in her cell, dresses in the dark and sweeps out of her bedroom into the nighttime darkness of the unlit convent? Unfortunately for Usimbalda, who was “good and holy in the opinion of her nuns and of everyone who knew her,” she has failed to realize that in her haste she has draped over her head not her veil but the pants of the priest who sleeps with her. The abbess’s indignant castigation of Isabetta quickly loses steam as the novice and then the other nuns notice the pants on the abbess’s head, their “suspenders dangling down on either side of her face.” When, however, the realistic abbess realizes what headdress she is sporting and that “there was no way of concealing her own sin from the nuns, who were all staring at her with eyes popping right out of their heads,” concludes Boccaccio’s storyteller,

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Abbess went back to sleep with her priest and Isabetta with her lover, who continued to visit her often, despite the envy of the other nuns, who, lacking lovers, consoled themselves in secret as best they could.

The abbess’s belated assertion—that it is “impossible to defend oneself against the promptings of the esh”—is Boccaccio’s own rock-bottom belief, one that leads him to vilify almost all priests and religious as insu erable hypocrites. His deepest faith is expressed by Guiscardo the Page, one of Boccaccio’s more sympathetic characters, who tells his prince, whose daughter he has been sleeping with, that “against the force of Love all men, whether pages or princes, are equally helpless.” Like the pagan Greeks and Romans, whose writings were being rediscovered and newly revered in his day, Boccaccio fears that to go against “Nature” is to risk impairment, “for her laws cannot be de ed without exceptional strength, and those who defy them often labor in vain or do much harm to themselves. I for one confess that I possess no such strength, nor do I wish for it.”

Boccaccio is not just telling tales; he is pushing a point of view. “A lover’s kisses,” he points out, are often “much tastier than those of a husband.” So whatever cena d’Amore,

whatever supper of love is to one’s taste, Boccaccio prays “God in his over owing mercy quickly to bestow the same thing upon me and upon every other Christian soul inclined to enjoy such a feast.” And, please, lay aside any religious scruples: in one of Boccaccio’s later stories, a ghost returns from Purgatory to tell a living man that, though he can expect to pay for his sins in the afterlife, his sexual peccadilloes won’t be numbered among his transgressions: “Down here,” counsels the ghost, “such things don’t count for much.”

This hardly means that Boccaccio shrugs o evil. In the story of Tedaldo, for instance, who leaves Florence when his lady love, Ermellina, turns mysteriously against him, the lover returns many years later only to nd that Ermellina’s patient and forgiving husband, Aldobrandino, has been sentenced to death for the murder of Tedaldo himself.

When Tedaldo heard this he began to re ect how easy it is for people to stu their heads full of totally erroneous ideas, thinking rst of how his brothers had mourned and buried a stranger in his stead and then how an innocent man had been accused on the basis of their false suspicions and then sentenced to death on the evidence of false witnesses, and he also pondered the blind severity of laws and magistrates who, in order to demonstrate their zealous pursuit of truth, very often use cruel tortures so as to cause falsehood to be accepted for fact, claiming the while to act as ministers of God’s justice, whereas in reality they are instruments of the Devil and all his iniquities.

In such a re ection we feel the heat of Boccaccio’s savage indignation and his impatience with the commonly tolerated injustices of his society (which, in respect to the casual frequency of wrongful conviction at least, was not so very di erent from our own).

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of poor beggars. In the intervening years, however, the friars had, er, evolved. “Is there a friar who does not act the hypocrite?” asks another of Boccaccio’s storytellers.

Oh, scandal of this wicked world! They’re not in the least ashamed of looking fat and ushed, or e eminate in their dress and accoutrements, and they strut around not at all like the doves they think they resemble but, rather, like the cock o’ the walk with crest erect. And what’s worse—and let’s not even mention that their cells are stocked with ointments and salves, huge boxes of sweets, phials and asks of perfume and fragrant oils, and casks over owing with Malmsey wine and other such exotic vintages, all making their abodes look more like perfume shops or gourmet grocers than like friars’ quarters—they are not ashamed to let others know they’re su ering from gout, self-deceived that people are unaware that regular fasting, a spare and simple diet, and sober living keep a person lean and healthy; or if such a man should fall ill, it’s not from gout, for which the commonly prescribed cures are chastity and all the things be tting the life of a simple friar. They think others do not realize this … and do not know that neither Saint Dominic nor Saint Francis ever owned four cloaks each but wore clothes to keep out the cold, rather than to cut an elegant gure.… May God see to it that they and all those simpletons who supply them with these things get what they deserve in the end!

Harrumph! If the sins of the friars seem a tri e tame compared with those of the magistrates, it must be noted that in Boccaccio the clergy come in for more criticism than do the secular authorities. It may be that in the mid-fourteenth century the well-developed structures of the church seemed far more present and oppressive than did the still-sketchy structures of the state. Whatever the case, Boccaccio never misses an opportunity to lambaste the presumptuousness of the clergy.

In the course of telling the story of Brother Alberto of Imola—a “thief, pimp, forger, and murderer” who becomes a successful preacher and sleeps with an easily attered merchant’s wife after convincing her that he is the Angel Gabriel—Lady Pampinea has occasion to rail against scams such as indulgences by which the clergy sucker the credulous: “And rather than earning Paradise as we all must do, [the clergy] act almost as if they were its very lords and owners, assigning to each person who dies, depending on how much money he has bequeathed to them in his will, a more or less choice perch up there, and in doing this they rst of all deceive themselves (if they really believe what they say), and then they deceive everyone who trusts them.”

Here in the early 1350s, Boccaccio is already rubbed the wrong way by a phenomenon that will continue to grate on i svegli—those who are awake—till, nearly seventeen decades later, their demur, having only gained in seriousness over the course of time, will erupt in the Reformation. And there lies in the Decameron, as if hidden in plain view, an even more portentous tale of future eruptions, if only one were to read it aright. It is a story told by Lord Pan lo, indeed the second story told on the very rst day, so Boccaccio surely means to give it a sort of spotlight.

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his lack of faith.” For in this period Christian theology did not allow non-Christians to reach Paradise. So Giannotto begins to plead with his friend to accept baptism, for “as he himself could see, the Christian faith was always growing and spreading, while Judaism was growing ever smaller.”

In our day, this kind of badgering would almost certainly have ended the friendship (surely few faults are less attractive than the smugness of the cultural imperialist), but Abraham, who was learned in his ancestral religion, displays extraordinary patience with his well-meaning, if obtuse, friend, even nding his arguments “entertaining.” At long last Abraham weakens a little, but, rst, he says, “I want to visit Rome to have a look at the man you call ‘the Vicar of God on Earth.’ I wish to study his style of life as well as that of his brother cardinals.” Hearing this, Giannotto is cast down, knowing that “I have wasted my time.… For if he visits the Roman court and sees the foul and sordid lives of the clergy, not only will he not change from Jew to Christian, but if he had already become a Christian, he would doubtless go back to being a Jew!”

Abraham, as the teller of the tale informs us, is “a most perceptive man” and missed nothing on his Roman holiday. As he “carefully observed the behavior of the pope, the cardinals, and the other prelates and courtiers,” he took note that “from highest to lowest, they all without shame were steeped in lechery, not only the natural variety but also sodomy, and without the least embarrassment or remorse—so much so that the along with Florence, as one of the two great hubs of emerging European capitalism.

On Abraham’s return to Paris, his Christian friend asks him with trepidation what he thought of the Roman court. Abraham spares Giannotto no detail, sharing his assessment that these clergy “are trying with all the talent and skill at their disposal to destroy the Christian religion and to drive it from the face of the earth.” But since they have not succeeded, but rather since Christianity “continues to spread and grow ever brighter and more radiant, I am of the opinion that it must have the Holy Spirit as its foundation and mainstay.” In conclusion, Abraham asks to be baptized forthwith and the two friends set off for the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

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merchant, seems to have experienced his own conversion, though not exactly to the Catholicism of the pope and the cardinals. The monk’s name was Martin Luther.

The striking change in tone and sensibility between the Comedy and the Decameron,

the two monumental masterpieces of early Italian literature, suggests a disruption in Italian life. As the Irish-English Catholic-Marxist critic Terry Eagleton has cannily observed, “transformation in our language games generally re ects an upheaval in material forms of life.” In this case, the upheaval is not hard to nd; indeed it is presented to us by Boccaccio at the very start of the Decameron. The most noble gures of the High Middle Ages—Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, Giotto di Bondone—had all lived and died between the late twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries. And in 1347 a terrible plague struck Europe, hitting Florence full force in late spring of 1348. Soon enough, there would be no going back to the supernal gentleness of Francis, the light- lled philosophical explorations of Aquinas, the grave vision of Dante, or the sweet playfulness of Giotto. Even the human compassion and fellow feeling that Boccaccio lauds in the very rst sentence of his masterpiece, quoted at the outset of this section, will be cast aside.

“In the face of this pestilence no human precaution or remedy was of any avail,” writes Boccaccio. “Its rst symptoms in both men and women were swellings in groin or armpit,” which soon would grow to the size of an egg or apple, then spread throughout the body, turning black or sometimes livid. “Few of the sick recovered, and almost all died after the third day.… Not only did talking to or keeping company with the sick induce infection and the death that spread everywhere, but also touching the clothes of the sick or touching anything that had come in contact with them or been used by them seemed to communicate the disease.”

Since there was as yet no accurate medical theory to explain communicable disease, people devised their own solutions. “There were those who thought that abstemious living and the avoidance of any extravagance” might do the trick. “They shut themselves up in houses where there were no sick people” and even “refused to speak to outsiders or listen to any news of the sick and the dead who lay outside.… Others thought otherwise: they believed that drinking to excess, enjoying themselves, singing their hearts out and living it up, sating all their appetites, and making light of anything that happened was the best medicine.” People abandoned their holdings; houses became common property, and “reverence for law, whether divine or human … virtually disappeared,” since the ministers of religion and the magistrates of secular law were all dying o , just like everyone else. There was plenty of alternative medicine on o er, as many thought that smelling flowers or consuming herbs might keep one safe.

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deserted brother, uncle forsook nephew, sister left brother, and very often wife abandoned husband, and—even worse, almost unbelievable—fathers and mothers stopped caring for their children as if they were not their own.” Servants were in short supply, to such an extent that “when a woman fell ill, no matter how elegant or beautiful or re ned she might have been, she did not mind employing a manservant (whether young or old), and she had no scruple whatsoever about revealing any part of her body to him.” This practice, speculates Boccaccio, was one “cause of a certain continued lapse in the chastity of those women who survived.”

Many of the poor and those without servants “ended their lives in the public streets” or were found dead in their homes “thanks to the stench of their rotting bodies.” Corpses would be left abandoned in the night on their own doorsteps, to be collected in daylight by gravediggers of the lowest class and thrown unceremoniously into a huge trench. As the corpses piled up, churchyards lled to capacity, the few remaining priests became negligent in their duties, and nally funerals were discontinued altogether, events having reached such a pass that “the dead were treated as we might treat a dead goat.” In the end, “more than one hundred thousand human beings are believed to have perished for certain within the walls of Florence—whereas before the plague struck, no one would even have estimated that the city contained so many inhabitants.”

In the midst of the plague, the seven noble ladies and three noble gentlemen of Boccaccio’s masterwork set out from the city, along with their servants, to entertain one another with their tales, while living decorously and discreetly in the countryside. They are representatives of those who think moderate living may save them. But we are never told how many of these storytellers survive the plague.

The pandemic, usually called the bubonic plague—after the buboes (or swelling lymph nodes) that were its most obvious symptom—killed o about half of Europe’s population, worldwide possibly as many as a hundred million. It would not be called the Black Death for many centuries. Its origins lie in China, from which it was carried by black rats into Europe in the wake of medieval Europe’s immensely expanded trade with Asia. The e ects on Europe were not uniform: southern Europe—particularly Spain, southern France, and Italy—may have lost as much as 80 percent of its population, whereas in much of northern Europe the loss may have been as low as 20 percent, in parts of Scandinavia even lower, though the numbers were seldom uniform across large areas. Paris, Europe’s largest city, lost half its population, London a similar percentage.

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the north; and the agellants, the bands of men who whipped themselves publicly in reparation for the human sins that they believed had brought on the plague, were a marked feature in southern towns and in German ones, but were almost entirely unknown as far north as Scandinavia.

Wherever the plague struck, waves of accusation and intolerance seemed to strike in its wake. Sinners were responsible, or heretics, or foreigners, or beggars, or lepers— whoever was Other. None su ered more from these waves than communities of Jews. In early 1349, the Jews of Strasbourg were slaughtered, later that year all the Jews of nearly two centuries later, would have been much less in uenced by the devastations of the plague. But the Decameron surely serves as a bellwether of late medieval disenchantment and presages future disjunctions within a Europe that will only grow more regionally diverse from this time forward.

The long cultural lassitude that a ected Western Europe after the fall of Rome in the late fth century AD stretched through the so-called Dark Ages and was alleviated only toward the end of the eleventh century by a rising merchant class, greater wealth, the growth of cities, a new con dence, more leisure, and an expanding interest in education and the arts. This blossoming—often referred to as the twelfth-century renaissance— propelled Europe forward for two and a half centuries, fostering continuing cultural (and even scienti c) experimentation and excitement that looked unstoppable.1_In important ways, however, this great movement was halted in its tracks in the mid-fourteenth century by the advent of an infection that appeared to be of cosmic proportions.

1381–1451: LUTHERANS LONG BEFORE LUTHER

Perhaps someday someone will write a history of rhyme and its impact.

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century of the Christian era, Augustine of Hippo did occasionally play with rhyme, especially in his sermons, for the sake of giving his African congregation an easily remembered phrase, such as bona dona (good gifts). One might almost wonder if his method is the prototype for the rhyming of African American preachers like Jesse Jackson. In the late sixth century, we nd a few examples of what may be intentional slant rhyme in the slick hymns of that urbane Italo-Gallo-Germanic courtier Venantius Fortunatus.

In the eleventh century, we nd the Old French poets, the authors of The Song of Roland and other stirring chansons de geste, who employ rhyme as a matter of course, as do the jingly Latin writers of Germany in such twelfth-century collections as the Carmina Burana. In the thirteenth century, in the jolly, singsong Latin hymns of such writers as Thomas Aquinas (who was no doubt taking a day o from weightier pursuits), rhyming took a de nite place in church ceremony. Thence it traveled easily to all the emerging European vernaculars, useful in giving shape to both song and spoken poetry. Medieval playfulness had won a permanent victory over classical dignity.

But we should never minimize the importance of rhyme as a mnemonic device, especially useful to both street monger and preacher (or, in more modern times, to politicians) who want their spoken message to stick permanently in the minds of their listeners. And it was in this guise that a single rhyme brought about a late-fourteenth-century rebellion that would reverberate through all of subsequent European history.

When Adam dalf and Eve span, Who was thanne a gentilman?

This was the question John Ball put to his many audiences. Ball was an English priest, and his question was posed perfectly in the English of his day. “Dalf” is the original past tense of the verb “delve” (or dig); “span” is the original past tense of the verb “spin.” So, when Adam and Eve, expelled from the Garden of Eden, were the only humans on earth, toiling away at their various tasks, who stood on the sidelines at leisure? Why, no one. In the original order of the fallen world, decreed by God himself, there were only laborers, who toiled at all the necessary obligations imposed on human beings. There was then no leisured class, no gentlefolk whose privilege it was to observe the laborers and idly pro t from their ditch digging and cloth spinning and all the rest of the work that was their lot in life.

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decent working men and women!

Contemporary chronicles, written by clerics, who were employed by nobles and bishops, are all against Ball, so much so that it is impossible to separate fact from ction in their accounts. Ball, they say, was a “hedge priest,” a self-ordained preacher without parish or other normal clerical post. He wandered from town to town, barefoot and stirring up trouble. He preached not in churches but in the open on village greens. He had been excommunicated for his opinions, and the English had all been forbidden to hear him preach—forbidden by competent ecclesiastical authority. But still the ignorant and unlettered came to learn what they might from “the mad priest of Kent,” as the French chronicler Froissart contemptuously called him.

However despicable and unwelcome Ball may have appeared to his betters, to the peasant farmers—the so-called villeins or serfs in bondage to their local lord, who had the right to extract unpaid service—he was a truth teller; and the few sentences of Ball’s that have survived only con rm his powerful—and long-echoing—eloquence: “From the beginning all men were created equal [emphasis mine] by nature, and … servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord.”

As the national economies of Europe had experienced considerable growth, the gulf between the world of peasants and servants and the world of lords and bishops grew immense. In many places, peasants toiled incessantly, starved in lean times, died young, and saw many of their children die, as they had always done. They had few pleasures, fewer recreations. The lords and ladies, however, and their clerical equals had managed to make for themselves a new world of pleasure. When Boccaccio’s ten privileged storytellers reach their destination in the countryside, they nd the grounds “abundant in di erent kinds of shrubs and trees, rich in green foliage. On the summit of a hill was a great country house, built around a ne and large inner courtyard and containing loggias, halls, and bedrooms, all of them perfectly proportioned and marvelously decorated with depictions of gay scenes. Surrounding the house were glorious meadows and gardens and wells of fresh water and cellars stocked with precious wines, more suited to wine-bibbers than to well-behaved, respectable young ladies. And the party discovered, to no little delight, that the place had been cleaned from top to bottom, all the beds made, fresh and seasonal owers everywhere, and the oors strewn with rushes.” Though hardworking serfs and servants are scarcely alluded to in such airy descriptions, their solid, loyal, essential presence undergirds everything.

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from Kent led by Wat Tyler (whose name is permanently a xed to this insurrection, known as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion) and an army from Essex led by the priest Jack Straw. They commandeered the Tower and beheaded Simon of Sudbury, the antipathetic archbishop of Canterbury, whose name was associated with an unjust poll tax leveled against the peasants. They beheaded several other Canterbury clerics and even executed Richard of Wallingford, uncle to King Richard II, who was then a boy of fourteen and easily led by his elders.

When the rebels insisted on meeting with Richard, he agreed and met with them at Mile End, where he promised to address their grievances. This was a ruse, however. The very next day, Wat Tyler would be knifed to death by the Lord Mayor of London, with assistance from one of the king’s knights, in Richard’s presence. Once the armies, charmed by the boy king, had disbanded, Richard went back on his word, Jack Straw was beheaded, and John Ball was hanged and, while still alive, drawn (that is, cut down, castrated and disemboweled, his organs burned while he watched), decapitated, and quartered, his quarters and severed head sent for display to ve strongholds of rebellion as reminders of the fate that awaited rebels. When a respectful deputation of peasants later begged the king to ful ll his promises, Richard would dismiss them with the words “Villeins ye are still and villeins ye shall remain.”

Behind this rebellion and others like it in continental Europe, especially in France, lay a great economic shift that had occurred as a result of the Black Death. Because there were far fewer people, there was no longer any reason for serfdom. Without arti cial legal constraints, anyone could make a good living, because there were so many jobs to be done and so few to do them. So the lords of the English manors had got Richard’s grandfather and predecessor, Edward III, to proclaim the Statute of Labourers, according to which landowners could summon as many laborers as they needed and pay them no better wages than what they’d received before the plague. Despite my earlier reference to Karl Marx, a better way to understand the peasant unrest of this period may be to think of it in terms of our so-called free-market economy. What the peasants wanted was a market in which they could get whatever price a customer was willing to pay, so long as each provider of labor could be free and unconstrained in striking his bargain. Though the peasants lost this battle, there could no longer be any doubt that they would eventually win the war.

We know the punishment given John Ball was one reserved for high treason, not heresy. Convicted heretics were not hanged, drawn, and quartered but burned to death. The rebellion initiated by the preaching of Ball would, nonetheless, result eventually in not a few convictions for heresy and subsequent incinerations. Three especially should be considered.

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conspiracy, that of the Lollards, who probably got their name from their supposedly sloppy, uneducated speech. (They were thought to mutter or mumble “lull-lull” or “loll-loll,” as if their tongues were slow.) For slow-witted, slow-speaking dullards, however, their ideas were many and keen. Churchmen, they thought, should be poor like Christ and prohibited from accruing personal wealth. Wealthy church properties should be taxed. The endless hubbub about the nature of Christ’s presence in the elements of the Eucharist was excessive: no one really knew whether it was symbolic or real, and, if real, in what way. Far too much was made of images and relics in churches, which hardly deserved the reverence accorded them. Let’s stop paying clergy for prayers for the dead, which bene t only the rich. All the dead, as well as all the living, should be prayed for equally. Church ceremony should be simpli ed and the focus put on reading the Scriptures, which need to be translated into local languages, so that everyone may understand them. There is nothing special about ordained priests; every Christian is a priest. Priests have no special power to forgive sins and should not be expected to be celibate. Nonetheless, o cial churchmen should not concern themselves with secular matters, which are none of their business. War is wrong, as is capital punishment and the taking of oaths.

There were probably additional tenets held by various groups of Lollards. Soon enough, they had to meet in secret, and it becomes harder to track their beliefs. That John Ball was a Lollard seems indisputable; so was Sir John Oldcastle, boon companion of Prince Hal (one day to reign as King Henry V) and model for Shakespeare’s Falsta . At times, Chaucer has been labeled a Lollard and certainly seems, in The Canterbury Tales, to express Lollard-like sympathies. To combat Lollardy, Henry IV, Henry V’s father and Richard II’s successor, had, as early as 1401, issued De Heretico Comburendo

(On the Burning of Heretics), which prohibited both the translating of the Bible into English and the owning of such a Bible and made provision for the burning of heretics in England.

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Wyclif was very much an Augustinian Platonist, so much so that he was dubbed “John of Augustine” by his students. In advance of his time in so many ways, he also despised Aristotle.

Wyclif’s most famous disciple was Jan Hus, the Czech priest and reformer who to this day is held in special reverence by the Czech nation. He advocated theological and structural reforms similar to those of Wyclif—though it would be di cult to nd anything he had to say that would be unacceptable today to a moderate Roman Catholic —and was burned at the stake for his honesty and candor. His martyrdom took place not in his native Bohemia but in 1415 in the Alps at the ecumenical Council of Constance, whither Hus had journeyed to debate his proposals at the invitation of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, who had assured him of safe passage. He was condemned by a consensus of the bishops in attendance. He said he would die “with gladness” “in the truth of the Gospel.” As the ames licked higher, poor Hus, naked except for a high paper hat inscribed with the single word haeresiarcha (heresiarch), is reported to have called out that “in a hundred years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.” One hundred and two years later, Martin Luther will—or so it is recounted—nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church on October 31, now remembered as Reformation Sunday.

The most notorious heresy conviction in this period was that of Joan of Arc, an illiterate French peasant who was burned at the stake in 1431, at the probable age of nineteen, for having dared to attempt the military task of reuniting France and expelling its English occupiers. The church court that condemned her as a witch was an irregular one, convened by the sniveling bishop of Beauvais, an English partisan, who had not the ecclesiastical jurisdiction to try her case. Joan, a genuine mystic and visionary, would never have fallen into English hands if her sovereign, Charles VII, had had the courage to pursue the daring military strategies she urged on him. Everything in the extensive contemporary records underscores both her genius and her unadulterated honesty. The record of her trial reads at times like the gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus before Pilate. She was, perhaps somewhat too enthusiastically, awarded the title “the rst Protestant” by George Bernard Shaw. However challenging she may have appeared to the o cial church in her insistence on the truth of her personal inspiration over any supposed norms of Catholic orthodoxy, she was later than both Wyclif and Hus.3

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torture belong more properly to the period of the Renaissance and Reformation than to the medieval period to which they are so often referred. More than this, we should recall that in times past even the most reasonable and paci c of men imagined that heresy— that is, diversity of religious opinion—could not be tolerated if a society was to remain whole. As late as the enlightened eighteenth century, we find Samuel Johnson, that most considered of Englishmen, rendering this shocking judgment:

“They set out for Harwich in the stage-coach … as planned,” writes Christopher Hibbert in his biography. “Johnson, in high good humor, fell in conversation with a fat, talkative, elderly gentlewoman.… In the afternoon, the old lady began to talk violently against the Roman Catholics and of the horrors of the Inquisition. To the utter astonishment of everyone present, except Boswell who knew by now that he would talk on any side of a question, Johnson defended the Inquisition warmly, maintaining that a false doctrine should be checked on its rst appearance, that the civil power should unite with the church in punishing those who dared to attack the established religion, that none but such as these had ever been punished by the Inquisition.”

1452: THE THIRD GREAT COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION

The rst communications revolution was precipitated by the invention of writing in Mesopotamia a little more than ve millennia ago.4_{To begin with, the invention} seemed of use only to ancient accountants, those who counted up the sheep in the sheepfold and the wares in the warehouse. Soon enough, its manipulators discovered that it could also be useful for recording more complex human events (history) and even for making more permanent records of the tales they told one another (literature). But because writing soon required the mastery of thousands of separate symbols, its use was con ned to those who had the leisure to master such a complicated system. Literacy came to serve as a new means of political control.

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The third communications revolution was a rather drawn-out a air. It involved several inventions: paper, movable type, and the printing press.5_{In the early fteenth} century all these things came to Europe from East Asia, where the Chinese and the Koreans had been using them for hundreds of years. But movable type—manufactured symbols, such as the letters of the alphabet, that could be locked in a frame, inked, and impressed onto paper by a mechanical press—proved far more useful to alphabetical Europeans than the invention had ever been to Asians, who needed to draw on thousands of separate pictographic symbols in order to create a text, since their written languages, like those of Mesopotamia, had never known an alphabet.6

Johannes Gutenberg, the German who introduced printing to the West, was a jeweler and goldsmith who knew how to fashion metals into shapes. He realized he would need to use extremely hard material if he was to set up an assembly that could repeatedly stamp letters onto paper (thwack, thwack!) without the letters breaking up. He was the rst to make durable alphabetical typefaces out of lead and similar metals. (In the East, far less durable forms, fashioned from ceramic, wood, and sometimes bronze, had been employed.) For his press, he used a slightly altered winepress.

A little before 1440, Gutenberg produced his first printed pages, and by about 1452 he was printing his rst Bible. It was a large Latin Bible, using the Vulgate, the traditional translation made by Saint Jerome in the late fourth and early fth centuries from the original Hebrew and Greek texts. It is thought that 180 copies were printed, 135 on paper and 45 on vellum. Two colors of ink were used, black and red, and spaces were left for illuminations (in the medieval manner) to be added later by hand. In most copies the sheets were divided into two bound volumes. Fewer than fty copies of this first Bible have survived, most of them now quite incomplete.

What was most astounding about Gutenberg’s project—which he called Das Werk der Bücher, The Work of the Books—was the number of Bibles produced in his first print run. For in this period the catalogues of all the great university libraries of Europe barely contained, on average, more than one hundred separate book titles apiece. In the future made possible by Gutenberg, books of all kinds would be everywhere in multiple copies, and soon enough everyone would be reading, comparing, checking, communicating.

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she exulted, “is my one chance at immortality!”

What we see today is an aging woman, putting on weight, gesticulating silently and wildly, overacting in parts written for much younger actresses. Whatever Bernhardt’s talents, they are hidden from the camera. She should have had a look at what her fellow Frenchmen, the brothers Lumière, were doing with their new movie camera, making their un amboyant but exceedingly observant and natural documentaries, such as

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, which gives us a much better idea of the capabilities and limitations of the new medium in its astonishing realism. Alternatively, she could have consulted another of her countrymen, Georges Méliès, the original Cinemagician, who in such beguiling and awesome spectacles as A Trip to the Moon was the rst to experiment with lm’s fantastic capacity for trick photography. What lm has never been especially good at, however, is extending the experience of live theater.

The rst printed book was a Bible, impressed in a language intelligible only to educated Europeans. To those few who took note of what Gutenberg was up to, his must have seemed a commendably pious e ort, a more e cient way of doing what had always been done by scribes in monastic scriptoriums—and nothing more.

How wrong they would have been.

1_{This cultural movement is the subject of Volume V of the Hinges of History, Mysteries of the Middle Ages.} 2_{This exhortation sounds false to me, part of the general disdainful mischaracterizations of the peasantry by the}

educated classes. It is at one with the conspiratorial exhortation of Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 —“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!”—also used to demonstrate the supposed villainy of the villeins. But then, Shakespeare was hardly a fan of peasant uprisings.

3_{More than four and a half centuries after her martyrdom at the hands of churchmen, Joan was canonized by the pope}

and named a patron of France.

4_{See Volume II of the Hinges of History, The Gifts of the Jews,}_{Chapter I}_{. Quite recent and isolated finds—a few}

undecipherable hieroglyphs on tiny bone tags—at Abydos in Egypt may indicate that the Egyptians invented writing at almost the same time as the Mesopotamian Sumerians. But it would appear from the fragmentary evidence that the Sumerians disseminated their invention more quickly and used it far more extensively than did the Egyptians of this period.

5_{The economist W. Brian Arthur argues in The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves that new}

technologies are seldom, if ever, accidents but normally emerge as novel combinations of already existing technologies, brought together by human beings who are searching for means to ends they have already identified.

6_{Though Korean, like several other Eastern languages, would eventually adopt an alphabet, the Chinese languages would}

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they made silk-weaving machines with bobbins worked by pedals, which the Italians copied after a two-century delay. They also invented the rudder, the spinning wheel, acupuncture, porcelain, soccer, playing cards, the magic lantern, fireworks, the pinwheel, paper money, the mechanical clock, the seismograph, lacquer, phosphorescent paint, the fishing reel, the suspension bridge, the wheelbarrow, the umbrella, the fan, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the key, the toothbrush, and other things hardly worth mentioning.”

7_{The speaker is David B. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School, commenting on the role of Steve Jobs in computer}

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I

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

INNOVATION ON SEA AND LAND

There is something in the wind.

Heretics and Heroes Thomas Cahill

CONTENTS

PRELUDE

H

INTRODUCTION

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD